PhD process is only one path, but it has a number of useful attributes, such as being very close to the active state of the art research, feedback from experts in the field, handholding through the paper and grant process, and introduction to a large social network. Those are all very hard to do with home labs and biohacking. Things like journal clubs with other grad students often help people learn how to evaluate the literature with the appropriate context. Independent work is important, but teamwork and learning from others is far more important.

I've worked with some very smart people (famous software engineers with long track records of innovation) that wanted to help with bioinformatics, and they did do some cool things, but their lack of deep context (the sort of thing you can get from a PhD program or working in the field for many years) ultimately led to problems such as premature optimization for the wrong distribution of data.

Nonetheless, I have see independents who came to the field with no background, absorbed the ground knowledge, and made major contributions, but that's absurdly rare compared to PhDs.